Marie NDiaye

Biography

Marie NDiaye was born on 4 June 1967 in Pithiviers (Le Loiret), to a French mother and Senegalese father. She and her elder brother (the sociologist Pap NDiaye) were brought up by their mother, a teacher, in the Parisian suburb of Bourg-la-Reine (Hauts-de-Seine).

She published her first novel Quant au riche avenir (1985) at the age of 18, with the well-known avant-garde publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit, who would publish the vast majority of her novels (and later plays) until 2004. Her most recent texts have tended to be published by Gallimard. NDiaye is currently considered to be one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed living French authors. She won the Prix Fémina for her novel Rosie Carpe in 2001, and the Prix Goncourt for Trois femmes puissantes in 2009. In 2003, her play Papa doit manger entered the repertory of the Comédie-Française; she is the only living woman playwright to have been accorded this honour. NDiaye currently lives in Berlin with her husband, the writer Jean-Yves Cendrey, and their three children.

Marie NDiaye’s writing is characterised by its highly controlled limpidity and crispness, beneath the surface of which often lurk deeply painful or unspeakable emotions. Her characters dwell in a world of obscenely casual betrayal and humiliation, much of which is facilitated by social and familial structures of cruelty, complicity and abuse. NDiaye’s heroines and heroes are, for the most part, neither the innocent victims nor the main perpetrators of these machinations, usually lurching between positions of relative weakness and strength, from which they crush, are crushed, or else blankly collaborate in the eradication of those even more stigmatized than themselves. The NDiayean protagonist is usually driven by a desperation for power, influence, integration and normality, and is capable of the most fantastical mental, emotional and physical metamorphoses in order to obtain these prizes. As in the world of Kafka (perhaps her most obvious literary precursor), the fantastic exists chez NDiaye on an unremarkable – often comically banal – continuum with the drab everyday.

NDiaye has written novels, plays, short stories, a film screenplay, and a small number of children’s books. She has also published pieces that appear to defy categorization, such as the enigmatic photo-texts Autoportrait en vert (2005) and Y penser sans cesse (2011), as well as the strange La Naufragée (1999), the tale of an urban mermaid, whose narrative is interspersed with the paintings of Turner. As with the greatest recent practitioners of dream-like or non-realist art – one thinks of Julio Cortázar, Toni Morrison, David Lynch – NDiaye’s evocation of an almost unbearably incongruous strangeness at the heart of human existence is both traumatic and therapeutic at the same time, a necessary wrenching away from alienation and complacency, and a hurtling towards the awareness of one’s own doubleness, dislocation, and endless capacity for oppression, salvation and renewal.

Sheringham, Michael: ‘The Law of Sacrifice: Race and the Family in Marie Ndiaye’s En famille and Papa doit manger’ in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory edited by Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)

Sheringham, Michael: ‘The Law of Sacrifice: Race and the Family in Marie Ndiaye’s En famille and Papa doit manger’ in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory edited by Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)